Fri, February 07, 2003

I wrote earlier about Personas and Personality. A recent post on slashdot mentions techie personality types and claims that most developers and tech people have personality types that make up roughly 12% of the population. The author of the post writes:

When you study the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for techies you find that they are made up almost entirely of 4 types INTP, INTJ, ISTP, and ISTJ. nearly all the core software that runs the Internet was written by INTP and INTJ people. (In general INTs are more likely to like python or lisp while ISTs are more likely to like Perl.) NTs are concept oriented with STs are detail oriented.

INT*s make up about 2% of the population and IST*s make up about 10% of the population. The key is the IT in the type. “I” stands for Introverted and “T” stands for Thinking. The ITs make up only 12% of the population.…

The result is that the people writing the code have a point of view that is shared by only a small minority of the population. While the largest subgroup of the population has a point of view that is exactly opposite of the techies.

Good personality types for personas would then be ones that are more heavily represented in the general (non-tech) population. One could even assume that the “techie” types are already reasonably represented and may actually be the personality type of UI designer.